We congratulate professors Lora Aroyo (VU University Amsterdam), Alessandro Bozzon (Delft University of Technology), Veronika Cheplygina (Eindhoven University of Technology), Danna Gurari (University of Texas at Austin, USA) and Zoltán Szlavik (IBM Center for Advanced Studies Benelux) on winning the competition for the second Lorentz-eScience workshop with their proposal “Crowdsourcing for Medical Image Analysis”. We are very pleased that we can continue this program with such a high quality and interesting workshop.

Crowdsourcing for Medical Image Analysis

The vast amount of visual data collected at hospitals each year offers exciting opportunities for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of widespread diseases such as COPD or diabetes. However, progress in algorithms for CAD relies on annotated data, requiring costly annotation by medical experts. Crowdsourcing - outsourcing tasks to a crowd of internet users without any specific experience - has emerged in other communities, such as computer vision, to successfully offer a cost-effective, scalable alternative to extract meaningful information from images. However, medical images are still widely believed to be too difficult for untrained people to interpret.

Bringing together experts from academia and industry

This workshop will serve as an inter-disciplinary gathering for individuals in academia and industry interested in advancing this important, emerging field. The workshop will bring together experts from medical imaging (including clinical experts), machine learning (including computer vision) and crowdsourcing in order to identify key problems to tackle as a community, explore medical imaging datasets and crowdsourcing tools during hands-on sessions, and initiate projects to develop the community in the future.

The workshop will take place in the week of 9 – 13 July 2018 at the venue Lorentz Center@Snellius in Leiden, the Netherlands.

The Lorentz-eScience workshop competitions, organized by the Netherlands eScience Center and the Lorentz Center, sponsor leading-edge workshops on the application of digitally enhanced research. The workshops should bring together researchers from the academic scientific community with those from the public/private sector. More information: https://www.esciencecenter.nl/news/lorentz-escience-competition-2018